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Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

When you operate at "Google Scale", individual users don't matter. If the fraud system has a few false positives but on the whole saves the company money, it's still a win for the company. The moment they open some sort of review process, where they actually have to pay real people to look at things, a lot of their razor thin margins on their products would completely evaporate.

One idea I had recently is to pay Google -- put up a collateral of a few $100 to get someone to review your case. Consider it a fee to have someone with the authority to fix things look at your problem. Why don't they do something like this?

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This is not true. McDonalds runs at a bigger scale than Google and if I have a problem with my food I wouldn’t have a problem finding a person to complain to.

The problem is google runs at a global scale with less employees than most national companies. If they hired more people, this problem would go away. But of course that would mean they would have to kill their free plans.

Pick your poison. Cheap products but the risk of losing everything, or expensive alternatives with a phone number to call when you have an issue.

The problem is that Google thinks profits are more important than providing half decent support.

The users agree because they keep using gmail despite many good paid alternatives existing.

Only because the users haven't yet experienced a situation like this where the real value of "free" gets exposed.

Everyone loves to think "that can't happen to me" then act all surprised when the inevitable happens.

Grashopper and ant with a world full of grashoppers :p

I think we probably need some kind of government regulation so that you can’t just close someone’s account without warning or access to support, or at the very least, you can’t prevent them from exporting their data and migrating to another service.

... because they are? If you can't turn a profit then you go under, regardless of if you have good support or not.

There is a hell of a margin between maximizing-profit-at-the-expense-of-customers and going under. It just happen that Google has now enough critical mass to really not give a fuck about their customers.

Yeah, most people are perfectly happy to pay $4 for a Big Mac, but ask them to pay $4 a month for GMail, and they'll be upset.

McDonald's regularly has some machine down and when I need a refund from a purchase through the app everybody says you have to ask someone else.

That’s an interesting problem and it seems related to Googles issues. McDonalds wants to move in to a more automated, less staff system and you end up where no one at the store knows how to refund external purchases or prevent people from ordering things that are unavailable.

I've had a similar idea. It's not terrible, but gives Google a partial incentive to abuse it. I say "partial" because the perverse incentive would be offset by the PR hit. Paying for support for a problem Google created, and having the call centers become profit centers, would impose a reputational dent.

Google could charge small amounts for new account creation. $5 per new account could probably cover an increase in human-contactable support. But that also probably doesn't work because Google doesn't want any friction for users creating new accounts.

Probably the only solution is regulation. If a company is going to offer a vital service like email, even for free, then they should be required to provide procedures for restoring the account. Procedures that involve direct contact with a human at some point if the matter isn't resolved early on. I can't see the US passing such regulation any time soon, but perhaps the EU would step up.

So because they're too greedy to put decent customer service "at scale", we have to pay the tax of getting actual service done ?

>individual users don't matter

Until they do, of course. Higher profile people have had Google deactivate their accounts before and they manage to make enough noise to trigger the Google PR people who call the engineers or whoever and they fix the problem.

Individual users don't matter, mostly, because they don't have the platform or reach to annoy Google enough to fix the problem.

The collateral idea seems good, but it might encourage perverse incentives for Google. If they know they're going to get a few hundred bucks if they disable an account, I'd fear the rate of accounts being disabled may go up. Even if it doesn't, there would be the appearance that any account being disabled was for financial gain.

I wish I had a good answer for this, though.

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